Singalonga E-book: First Crime Novel with embedded Soundtrack launched

Sony Reader v. Newspaper - old and new a day after "the world changed".
Photograph by Ernesto Priego, Metropolitan line, November 5.

There is something of an E-book buzz right now, and after all the wait I'm pleased. Oprah went big on Amazon's Kindle a couple of weeks ago, and last night Harper Collins CEO Victoria Barnsley told a crowd at the LSE that the instant shopping angle of wireless enabled e-books such as the Kindle (in the USA) is a vital part of the e-book tipping point.

Forget the e-books can't furnish a room arguments (AKA male bookshelf status anxiety) and even the tactile angles. So much of the snobbery about e-books sounds just like journalists talking about the web a decade or so ago. They are coming.

Books, like newspapers, aren't about to vanish, but the lastest e-readers, like the Kindle and the Sony Reader (and even, just about, literary texts on the IPhone) are increasingly warm experiences. They are also amazing academic resources: imagine travelling with your entire doctoral bibliography, or every literary influence on the writings of - say - Doris Lessing.

So here, if you are going to go E-reader this Christmas, is a great South African - and culturally early - crime (e)-novel with 2020 dystopia, corporate apartheid, a rave review from Andre Brink AND...an added soundtrack. The novel, by Lauren Beukes, is called Moxyland. It is...

...the first ebook to contain an embedded music soundtrack. The soundtrack was compiled by African Dope Records to suit the mood and feel of the book's storyline. Arthur Attwell, Publishing Director of Electric Book Works says "To be worth buying and reading, an ebook should offer something that the print book can't offer. Ebooks offer many possibilities, including sound, links, colour, interactivity, and an almost unlimited number of pages. It’s important to take advantage of these."

So says publishers, Electric Book Works, of Cape Town, South Africa. And here's the publishers of the soundtrack. Did you know PDFs could embed sound? Me neither.


Full text of Victoria Barnsley's lecture at the LSE, via The Bookseller.

Images from the last US Election with Front Pages? Probably not.

Many more here. Thanks to NewsDesigner.

Blogger Tina Brown has good idea

Now can we please not risk any more catastrophes by letting this administration stick around? Just scrap the transition and let President Obama clean house right away like the Brits do at Number 10 Downing Street? In the country of my birth, the Prime Minister kisses the Queen’s hand and he’s in and the loser is on the way out with no time to make off with the silver.

Tina Brown in the Daily Beast.

Home Truths from Chicago: Journalism is dead™

Journalism is truly dead, and the situation may get worse with a liberal Congress, pushing the Fairness Doctrine, and a new administration that has shown a penchant for denying access to those who ask tough questions or have a dissenting opinion. We can only hope that the new president has the wisdom and courage to protect the First Amendment and a truly free press.

Kevin Brown in the Chicago Tribune.


Shortest honeymoon in History™ ?

Notes on Victoria Barnsley's LSE lecture

Harper Collins CEO, Victoria Barnsley spoke at the LSE last night. Some thoughts from a great publishing blog:

The coming change is driven by two things: (1) E-ink, (2) Publishers and retailers investing in digital distribution infrastructure. The ebook reading experience is getting better, in the form of the Kindle, Iliad and Sony Reader. The iPhone is a strong contender, as are all next-generation smartphones.

Kindle has the huge advantage of its wireless connection. Barnsley sees this as enabling the one thing that’s really changed books in the last decade: impulse shopping, as seen in Tesco’s and Asda, and in bookstores’ 3 for 2 offers. That’s the future. Imagine watching Cranford on the TV, and immediately downloading the complete works of Elizabeth Gaskell - “instant bedtime reading”. This impulse buying is the most significant development in bookselling.

Part of a blog by Apt about publishing, technology and design.

Future of the book project: collective readings in Doris Lessing

...for now, we believe books made of paper still have a substantial advantage over the screen for sustained reading of a linear narrative.

The Institute for the Future of the Book has organised for seven readers to work through Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, starting on November 10. The Lessing Seven will also "record their reactions to the process in a group blog". A public online forum for any of us reading along and following the conversation will also launch.


Buy The Golden Notebook here.

Derek Walcott: a poem for Obama and The Times

Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —

a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,

an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd

dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,

parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked

cotton

forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens

that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten

cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is

a tense

court of bespectacled owls and, on the field's

receding rim —

a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.

The small plough continues on this lined page

beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado's

black vengeance,

and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,

heart, muscles, tendons,

till the land lies open like a flag as dawn's sure

light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.

Derek Walcott in The Times.

New Media Mogul Realizes that Something Has Been Lost, finally

Along the way, I think, something has been lost. It's the same thing my mother lamented as she watched my generation abandon the newspaper - common ground, common spaces - a common set of facts around which we as humans can gather, debate, and connect. And therein lies an opportunity, I sense, to create a new kind of search that is in fact 'not' personalized, but rather socialized - shared and common to all.

Hmm. John Battelle on thought leadership and loss. Muscular Technocracy gets sensitive in middle age.

White Spaces not Just Newspapers' empty advertising slots

The FT on "White Spaces".

...the applications would span “everything from enhanced home broadband networks, to intelligent peer-to-peer devices, and even small communications networks.”

Another FCC commissioner, Jonathan Adelstein, claimed the new spectrum would support a “third pipe” to the home, a new channel for broadband to compete with existing services from telecoms companies and cable operators.

And a third, Deborah Tate floated a number of potential uses, including this: “Communities of users may find they are able to communicate seamlessly through mesh networks rather than traditional phone lines.”

FCC on "White Spaces."

Nihilism or Not? The Guy Fawkes Kid Goes Prosey and Self Justifying

Everything all right at home? Though this is interesting in an interpretive way...

Asking political bloggers to "add value" is to misunderstand the relationship between a free press and politicians. Take a memo Ms Blears, we are not here to "add value", or do what politicians want, Guido has his own values and aims to hit back at political hypocrisy and lies. Politicians make laws, so they should be held to account, to a higher standard. The Nick Robinsons, Peter Riddells, Michael Whites and Steve Richardsons of the world don't do investigative digging, they report back their impressions from their lunch meetings. They re-package and interpret spin from the party machines. That is how they "add value". They are what Peter Oborne memorably described as the "client media".

From Guido Fawkes' blog, on his birthday as it were.

What next for the successes of citizen journalism?

Five Thirty Eight has picked up a lot of traffic as a result of this combination of analysis and reporting, and deservedly so. I am not sure that it quite counts as citizen journalism, but it is definitely not journalism as we have traditionally known it.

From the FT.


538.

Web-obama

"He's run a campaign where he's used very modern tools, spoke to a new coalition, talked about new issues, and along the way, he's reinvented the way campaigns are run," says Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the nonprofit think-tank NDN, and a veteran of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. "Compared to our 1992 campaign, this is like a multi-national corporation versus a non-profit."

Ironically, it was McCain who first saw the internet's potential in a presidential race, running an experimental set of targeted banner ads during his doomed 1999 primary battle against George W. Bush. But eight years later, Obama finally teased out the net's full potential as an election tool.

The campaign's commitment to online organizing took shape during the primaries, when it hired online director Joe Rospars, a veteran of Howard Dean's web-heavy 2004 campaign, and lured Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to build its own social networking site, myBarackObama.com.

From Wired.

The Story Begins to Change

Get ready for a fight in this country over the political narrative. The Government will argue that it has a new progressive left ally and that McCain, who visited the Tory conference, was defeated by the left. The Conservatives will argue that time for a change defeated it's no time for a novice.

Daniel Finkelstein in The Times.

Ha! End of Journalism

After she voted in her hometown, Gov. Sarah Palin was asked if she had any regrets about the campaign, CNN reported.

Palin bemoaned "the state of journalism today."

Little more here.

Tuesday November 4

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief...



Update: this just in from Tom P of Croton (and C. Porter of, ah, Paris)

If a holy Hindu man can,
If a gangly Anglican can,
If in Lesbos, a pure Lesbian can,
Baby, you can can-can too.

Right might be Wrong

Right-wing critiques of the press are usually filed by ideologues who, rather than trying to improve journalism, are trying to eradicate it, which pretty much sums up the work being done at NewsBusters.

I was reminded of that while reading this utterly predictable complaint about how the liberal media is (surprise!) going to cost John McCain the campaign. Specifically, the NewsBusters item details how when polled informally, journalists as a group often vote Democratic. And, of course (goes the Newsbusters thinking), because they vote Democratic that means journalists report Democratic, whatever that means.

Eric Boehlert in Media Matters.

Warp Speed

“I think we’ll be analyzing this election for years as a seminal, transformative race,” said Mark McKinnon, a senior adviser to President Bush’s campaigns in 2000 and 2004. “The year campaigns leveraged the Internet in ways never imagined. The year we went to warp speed. The year the paradigm got turned upside down and truly became bottom up instead of top down.”

The NYT on the election that changed things.

After the election, the bias

“So what?” Those two cavalier words alone speak to the larger problem. Who cares if “80 percent or more of journalists covering the 2008 election” will vote for Barack Obama? Journalists, their editors, management, the candidates and the American people should care.

Douglas Mackinnon in the NYT.

Escape to Victory

Obama urges engagement and dialogue "with our enemies as well as our friends". He stresses the importance of restoring America's standing abroad. McCain does not say so directly, but he casts the rest of the world as an essentially hostile arena, a vast "Out There", full of menaces that America has to stare down. In a spirited stump speech - "The Mac is back!" - delivered in Springfield, Virginia at the weekend, the only references to the world beyond US shores were to dictators, and to Obama's refusal to use the word "victory" when discussing American involvement in Iraq.

Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian.


Evet de

Peer Review to Solve Credit Crunch?

Over time, and through much argument, a rough consensus emerged that recapitalizing the banks was ultimately the most likely approach to work. And sure enough, that's what ended up happening. Now, there is no clear paper trail linking the econoblogosphere to Hank Paulson's change of heart, but it would be foolish to argue that his or Ben Bernanke's economic pronouncements did not receive withering peer review.

From Salon.

Sunday in the Park With(out) George

More pictures here.

да мы можем

Reason not the need - as long as it is an "A" star

When asked to speculate further on why fewer British teenagers now display mature reasoning, Professor Shayler [of King's College, London] eschews local explanations and puts the blame squarely on television and computers. They take children away from the physical experiences on which later inferential skills are based, he thinks, and teach them to value speed over depth, and passive entertainment over active.

From The Economist (page 41, in fact). Subscription needed, I think.

E-book revenues in the USA alone to beat $12 million for the second quarter of '08

From the International Digital Publishing Forum.

Modish and Insincere™ : 1960 - 2008

The Mail doesn't care. It reliably sets its face against what it sees as modish and insincere. It offers a view of the world - that everything has gone downhill since the 1950s, when women stayed in the kitchen, sex was saved for marriage and homosexuality was shameful - that is now rarely found elsewhere, not even in the Telegraph as that paper strives for a younger, trendier audience. It understands that one of a newspaper's functions is to give its readers a sense of security, belonging and simple values in an increasingly complex and unsettling world. The Mail is a supremely confident paper. Where others, trimming to focus groups, muffle their message, the Mail projects it relentlessly, and with great technical skill, from almost every page.

Peter Wilby.

No Shocks, Just Numbers: Pew on Media choice and the election

Nearly three times as many people ages 18 to 29 mention the internet as mention newspapers as a main source of election news (49% vs. 17%). Nearly the opposite is true among those over age 50: some 22% rely on the internet for election news while 39% look to newspapers. Compared with 2004, use of the internet for election news has increased across all age groups. Among the youngest cohort (age 18-29), TV has lost significant ground to the internet.

More here.


그렇습니다 우리는 할 수 있다

Dream Inversion: the Trickle Up Effects

The rags-to-riches story—that staple of American biography—has over the years been given two very different interpretations. The nineteenth-century version stressed the value of compensating for disadvantage. If you wanted to end up on top, the thinking went, it was better to start at the bottom, because it was there that you learned the discipline and motivation essential for success. “New York merchants preferred to hire country boys, on the theory that they worked harder, and were more resolute, obedient, and cheerful than native New Yorkers,” Irvin G. Wyllie wrote in his 1954 study “The Self-Made Man in America.” Andrew Carnegie, whose personal history was the defining self-made-man narrative of the nineteenth century, insisted that there was an advantage to being “cradled, nursed and reared in the stimulating school of poverty.” According to Carnegie, “It is not from the sons of the millionaire or the noble that the world receives its teachers, its martyrs, its inventors, its statesmen, its poets, or even its men of affairs. It is from the cottage of the poor that all these spring.”

Today, that interpretation has been reversed. Success is seen as a matter of capitalizing on socioeconomic advantage, not compensating for disadvantage. The mechanisms of social mobility—scholarships, affirmative action, housing vouchers, Head Start—all involve attempts to convert the poor from chronic outsiders to insiders, to rescue them from what is assumed to be a hopeless state. Nowadays, we don’t learn from poverty, we escape from poverty...

Malcolm Gladwell on Goldman Sachs.

The Typographer's take on the campaign

Begins with Hilary's yellow pants suit, and ends with a prank call.

FT makes it a Full House on the BBC

But for all that scrutiny of its content, in the end it may be the BBC’s global commercial activities that finally prompt changes in the way it is funded – with implications for other broadcasters, production houses and content providers around the world.

With 21 offices from Los Angeles to Sydney and Mumbai to Tokyo, Worldwide operates 36 channels reaching 285m homes, makes its own programmes in several languages, sells 60 magazines in 57 countries as well as DVDs and audio books by the million, and manages one of the planet’s most popular websites. Programmes such as Doctor Who, Top Gear and Dancing With The Stars are broadcast on BBC-branded channels and sold to others.

All are part of the raison d’être of Worldwide: to exploit the BBC’s content and make money on behalf of the 25.3m UK householders who pay £139.50 a year for a television licence. Some £200m-£250m goes back to the BBC each year, including direct investment in programming.

But other Worldwide activities are less obviously linked to that purpose. For instance, it publishes editions of Hello! and Grazia magazines under licence in India. Recently, Worldwide bought minority stakes in three UK production companies and one in Australia. Most controversially, it paid £75m for a 75 per cent stake in Lonely Planet, the travel guide company, hoping to use the brand to market thousands of hours of BBC travel and natural history programming.

More on the BBC and the Numbers in the FT.

Facebook sentiment about Obama

It can be measured, sort of.

Slate Covers the Election Bases

This situation lends a feeling of unreality to the proceedings as we begin to measure the time until Election Day in hours. It is the elephant on the campaign plane. No one is letting on. Journalists aren't supposed to. Plus, we've been wrong so often, and politics can be so unpredictable, it would be dumb to say that Obama is going to win big.

Slate seeks to secure November 5 future.

An Unidentified Narrative Object, Gomorrah, & The Hindu

The Hindu on the nature of the new narrative.

In the mid-19th century, an angry not-so-young man, wishing to write his “complete representation of reality” had been, in the words of biographer Francis Wheen, “pushing out beyond conventional prose into radical literary collage — juxtaposing voices and quotations from mythology and literature, from factory inspectors’ reports”, injecting his long, detailed narrative with hardboiled newspaper reports as well as using devilish metaphors (a favourite of mine from an earlier publication: “...all that is solid melts into air” to describe dislocation).

In a way, Gomorrah, with its contemporary descriptions of “capital [being] dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour” is the mini Das Kapital of our times. And to mistake Saviano’s masterpiece as just ‘journalism’ would be to mistake Marx’s tumultuous classic as simply ‘economic theory’. It might not be everything that’s fit to print. But that’s our problem of defining the ‘fitness’ of things.

A question of balance

On any given night, there are two distinctly, even extremely, different views of the presidential campaign offered on two of the three big cable news networks, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, a dual reality that is reflected on the Internet as well.

On one, polls that are “tightening” are emphasized over those that are not, and the rest of the news media is portrayed as papering over questions about Mr. Obama’s past associations with people who have purportedly anti-American tendencies that he has not answered. (“I feel like we are talking to the Germans after Hitler comes to power, saying, ‘Oh, well, I didn’t know,’ ” Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator, told Mr. Hannity on Thursday.)

On the other, polls that show tightening are largely ignored, and the race is cast as one between an angry and erratic Mr. McCain, whose desperate, misleading campaign has as low as a 4 percent chance of beating a cool, confident and deserving Democratic nominee in Mr. Obama. (“He’s been a good father, a good citizen, he’s paid attention to his country,” Chris Matthews, the MSNBC host, said Wednesday night in addressing those who might be leaning against Mr. Obama based on race. “Give the guy a break and think about voting for him.”)

Yes, balancing up nicely at the NYT.


Or as FAIR put it:

...these are the quotes Rutenberg picks to show how similar the coverage on Fox and MSNBC is--one arguing that you shouldn't vote against a candidate based on his race, and the other comparing that candidate to a genocidal dictator.

BBC, BNP or Bank of Scotland - what's worse?

For £14.3m we could employ 677 nurses, 695 teachers or 596 coppers.. but we get 50 money-grabbing BBC fat cats

The News of the World World Exclusive about the BBC.


When the BBC loses the licence fee, and everything is Sky Two, remember: we let this happen.


When Marina Hyde gets it, it must be important.

How are you enjoying the BBC witch trials, in which the Daily Mail has so brilliantly inhabited the Joseph McCarthy role? Naturally, were it all to stop now, the paper could take a curtain call, and bouquets, and offers of guest spots at the Salem Temperance Festival. Yet one can't help feeling the past week is just the start of a play in three acts, which begins with something genuinely nasty happening in the woods, but quickly subsumes all manner of innocents. Oh, for an Ed Murrow to lay bare the hypocrisies, contradictions and self-interest that lie beneath the witchfinder general's demented pursuit.

Mail on Sunday: angry.


And World's Greatest Newspaper is class semi-conscious.


Here's the great Charles Moore:

In the course of their on-air conversation, the pair joke that, near their telephones, most grandparents have photographs of their grandchildren sitting on a swing, so they decide, laughing hysterically, to point out to Mr Sachs that Brand "enjoyed" his granddaughter on a swing. They say many, many other targeted, horrible things.

In short, they think through all the permutations of mental pain that can be inflicted, and inflict them.

When the Abu Ghraib atrocities against Iraqi prisoners filled our media, people rightly noted that the torment consisted not in physical pain, but in humiliation.

The humiliation was increased by photographing the acts. The torturers thought that what they did was funny. They were arrested, dismissed from the US armed services and imprisoned.

Jonathan Ross was doing essentially the same thing. He thought it was funny to use his power to torment someone mentally, and to let other people witness the torment. His punishment so far is to earn £4.6 million this year from the BBC, instead of £6 million.

I think Bruce Parry should be made to go and live in Kensington Square: I'd give him a day.


Some more Charles Moore because we need a laugh:

At a time when taxes are rising, it would be a political winner for a party to promise the abolition of the licence fee, but of course this won't happen. Conservatives and Labour alike are terrified of the way the BBC would trash them if they did.

So it falls to us, the public. We do not have the power to stop Ross and Co by switching off. Time, then, to revolt.

My own modest contribution will be as follows. If Ross is still in post when my television licence next comes up for renewal, I shall keep my television, but refuse to pay the fee.

Instead, I shall hand over the £139.50 to Help the Aged, and wait for Mark Thompson's detector van to come to my door.

Charles Moore is 52 years old. Is that old enough for him to write the cheque to himself?

Bush Language

In psychiatric parlance, rigid polarities like those the President has made time and again are regarded as pathological: 'splitting'. The patient is unable to tolerate ambiguity and insists on viewing the people in his life through an 'all good' or 'all bad' lens. Bush and his cohorts have been masterful splitters, employing a language that gives no room for exchange and necessarily distorts reality, which, unfortunately, is usually murky. This kind of speech does not recognise an interlocutor, a real human other. It is speech without empathy, and it is startlingly similar to the rhetoric of the Muslim radicals who spew venom on the West and 'the enemies of Islam'.

Siri Hustvedt in the Observer....

who describe her thus:

Novelist, essayist and poet whose most recent novel, The Sorrows of an American, came out this year. Married to fellow writer Paul Auster.

We do truly live in Mad Men, don't we?

Could this be the worst film ever made?

Doesn't look good, does it?

Studs Terkel (May 16, 1912 - October 31, 2008)

That's what we're missing. We're missing argument. We're missing debate. We're missing colloquy. We're missing all sorts of things. Instead, we're accepting.

Studs Terkel

More echoes from the Trust Anti-Chambers

The media has succeeded in shielding Barack Obama from journalistic scrutiny. It thereby irrevocably destroyed its own reputation and forfeited the trust that generations of others had so carefully acquired. And it will never again be trusted to offer candid and nonpartisan coverage of presidential candidates.

Worse still, the suicide of both print and electronic journalism has ensured that, should Barack Obama be elected president, the public will only then learn what they should have known far earlier about their commander-in-chief — but in circumstances and from sources they may well regret.

Victor Davis Hanson from his variation on the "The End of Journalism" published in the National Review Online.

James Bond, the conspiracy starts in Petersburg

Sergei Malinkovich, the leader of the city [Communist] party, told The Times: “Everyone knows that the CIA and MI6 finance James Bond films as a special operation of psychological warfare against us. This Ukrainian girl sleeps with Bond and that means that Ukraine is sleeping with the West.”

The Communist Party has withered since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 but it remains the second-largest party in the Duma, the Russian parliament. The St Petersburg branch is a breakaway faction and a vocal opposition in Russia's second city.

From The Times.

Collective journalism at its best

New America Media and the Maynard Institute have convened an array of Bay Area journalists, as well as highly respected media organizations and local university journalism departments to form an investigative team to honor and continue the work of journalist Chauncey Wendell Bailey Jr., and answer questions regarding his death. Bailey, the editor of the weekly Oakland Post, was murdered on Aug. 2, 2007, while reporting on a story regarding the suspicious activities of the Your Black Muslim Bakery.

More here.

It used to be an Englishman that takes his time, now it's a feature writer/blogger

Unlike some of the journalists for not only the daily papers but for networks, who have to constantly blog as well as file stories, I could be a little more leisurely, and beyond that, maintain a big-picture perspective. And frankly, the McCain campaign was much more responsive to that approach. They’ve come to be rather disdainful of the hyper-blogging that takes place on the press bus, and they think it has increased this mind-set of “gotcha” journalism, where every time John McCain would say something, instead of asking a follow-up question, people would go scurry off to their laptops and post to their blogs. And the McCain campaign believes that’s not what journalism ought to be. I’m not positing myself as some kind of superior journalist, it’s just that the format of long-form journalism allows me to be a little more leisurely, allows me to look at the longer view of things, and allows me two-and-a-half months on a single story.

GQ's Robert Draper on the pleasures of taking it slow.


WWD.com interviews Draper.

Bill Kristol forgets who he works for

"You're reading The New York Times too much," he [Kristol] declared.

"But you work for The New York Times," [Jon] Stewart pointed out.

From Editor and Publisher.

Watch me single-handedly lose the US Election

Easy.

Trust & Journalism gets a nice workout

In the past, we asked the audience for trust (and money). There was an exchange of news in return. Thus, the BBC points to ‘trust’ ratings as a way of sanctioning its public subsidy.

Yet, as Adrian Monck has pointed out, this was not really the whole point of news. News has always been about entertainment, distraction, partisan persuasion, and relativism as well as ‘truth’.

There was no Golden Age when journalists were seen as impartial conveyors of reality. Trust was always conditional. Along with politicians and most authority figures and institutions, journalism is questioned now to a greater degree than ever before. I welcome that.

Charlie Beckett, from a chapter in a new book, Beyond Trust, edited by John Mair.

Another hostage-captor situation...

"You lose contact with the outside world," says Bai. "You call your spouse at home and talk about the trail and the person at home just doesn't get it or care, because it's the same story over and over again. It's murder on relationships." Every four years, Bai says, there's at least one divorce or break-up. "It's just not a normal human experience."

And even if your relationship survives, your personality might not. Last week, Lizza, who was banned from the Obama plane in July, found his way back on and thought he had stumbled on a lost colony. "It felt like the Lord of the Flies in there," he says. "The people who have been there for a long time have all of their little decorations and knickknacks all over the back of the plane. Everyone's a little grumpy and territorial, and there's this sense of people thrown together who have been with each other way too long. I got the sense that I was dropping in on a hostage-captor situation."

From The New Republic: on the campaign trail, the human story.

Tables Turned on Newspapers

Thanks to PSFK.


Tables by David Stovel Design.

Newspapers & Magazines are most trusted for election information...

...say C-level executives in America. This research is

based on in-depth interviews with more than 30 "C-level" executives at companies exceeding $1 billion in revenue and representing a diverse geographic and industry base.

"Even though it is well documented that the print media has been steadily losing ground in recent years, it is arguably the most influential source of information on important topics for CEOs, CFOs and other senior executives," said Eva Schmatz, president, SUMMUS Limited. "There is a lot more life in this channel than people give credit."

The Wrong Stuff: Tom Wolfe on the new new Journalism

Edon Ophir interviews Tom Wolfe for The Ithican Online.

It’s obviously going to go online, which presents a certain number of problems. Young people, if my own children are any indication, will turn right to the Internet to get particularly breaking news, because the Internet gets it so much faster than radio or television. In Madison, Wis., where the University of Wisconsin is, the newspaper has stopped printing completely. It’s completely online. One problem with it is computer screens are backlit, and it’s very hard to read anything at length if you’re reading a backlit screen. It’s just irritating. The second problem is the computer scrolls, I’m sure you’ve noticed that, you can’t turn a page, it scrolls. You know the monks were so happy to get rid of those damn scrolls in the 14th century and get pages and here we are back at the scrolls, and so it’s very hard for any new idea to get hold except in some medium where you can read at length without it bothering your eyes. Maybe the Kindle will solve that. I haven’t heard enough reports about the Kindle.

Television, but different

Just try.

Building the Music Archive - a new history

This is (part one) of a really interesting series of articles about music collections, and technology - by Martin Belam.

When you used to talk about 'volume control' in the sense of music, it was associated with how loudly you could annoy your parents or neighbours. Nowadays it is more likely to refer to the sheer volume of digital media in your possession.

At the end of March 2007 I had 15,741 tracks in the iTunes library on my PC, of which I had played 4,084 at least once. That represents 25.9% of the titles, or just a shade over a quarter of the tracks. Meaning that, according to iTunes, I had never listened to around three-quarters of my collection.

I'd taken the time to rate 2,680 tracks. Yet, again, according to iTunes, of the tracks that I had rated, I had never played 38% of them.

Rating has become the new "volume control" for music consumption. With a library that large, rating songs allows us to narrow down what we actually want to hear, rather than what we simply want to have.

For the whole 12 part series in PDF, go here.

There's always that moment when somebody just walks away...

Alex Pentland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed cellphone-like gadgets to listen to people as they chat, and computer programs that sift through these conversational cadences, studying communication signals that lie beneath the words.

If commercialized, such tools could help users better handle many subtleties of face-to-face and group interactions — or at least stop hogging the show at committee meetings.

From the NYT.

The End of History is Cancelled, again 2 (ft. Equality is a European Value)

Equality, which is the primary value of the left, is a European value, not an American value. Let me tell you that right now. I know this sounds offensive to half of my fellow Americans, because they have been Europeanized in their values. The French Revolution is not the American Revolution. The French Revolution said Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. The American Revolution said Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. We have lost touch with what our distinctive American values are. We have distinctive American values. … We have a better value system, and this is being protected by one of the two parties: the Republican party.

Dennis Prager is a radio host:



Thanks to Think Progress.

The End of History is Cancelled, again

America has been living in a dream world for the past few years, losing its basic values of thrift and prudence and living far beyond its means, even as it has lectured the rest of the world to follow its model. At a time when the U.S. government has just nationalized a good part of the banking sector, we need to rethink a lot of the Reaganite verities of the past generation regarding taxes and regulation. Important as they were back in the 1980s and ’90s, they just won’t cut it for the period we are now entering.

From The American Conservative: Fukuyama endorses Obama.

Media and Psychotic Delusion - that old one

A very interesting finding was a significant increase in outside influence and control delusions with technical themes following the spread of radio and television in Slovenia. To the best of our knowledge, no such studies exist with which to compare our results.

Both of these new technical devices, which served as a means to powerfully and quickly disseminate information, apparently became appropriate for 'serving' as a means of influence and control in the eyes of schizophrenia patients.

In the age of paranoia, my MTV wants me: from the always wonderful Mind Hacks.


The Report.

On the Street where you vote

Archon Fung, in conjunction with ABC news, has launched a "crowd sourcing" initiative to identify problems at polling places, called MyFairElection....

...As thousands of citizens rate their voting experiences, MyFairElection will produce a real-time "weather map" of voting conditions across the country. This map will allow viewers to see where it is easy to vote, and where people have encountered obstacles. Journalists, advocates, officials, and citizens can use this map to address obstacles to voting in real time.

From the Complexity and Social Networks Blog of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Program on Networked Governance, Harvard University .

Cass Sunstein calls these information "cascades"

Politico gets into the Obama tech story too today:

...the campaign’s best hire: Facebook founder Chris Hughes, 24, and other members of his young Internet squad. They built one of the most vibrant and interactive Internet fundraising operations in history. The computer wizards also came up with the idea of buying Internet ad space on billboards embedded inside online games. Talk about real world meeting the virtual one.

Forget the Jon Stewart show...this is Obama

Obama is the first to successfully integrate technology with a revamped model of political organization that stresses volunteer participation and feedback on a massive scale, erecting a vast, intricate machine set to fuel an unprecedented get-out-the-vote drive in the final days before Tuesday's election.

"I think what was recovered in this campaign is the sense of what leadership is, and what the role of the technology is, so that you get the best out of both," says Marshall Ganz, a public policy lecturer at Harvard who designed the field-organizer and volunteer training system used by the Obama campaign. "The Dean campaign understood how to use the internet for the fund-raising, but not for the organizing."

From Wired.

"...the terminal conclusion for newspapers: basically bankruptcy..."

So Portfolio asked Marc Andreessen

If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?

Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business—shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.

The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess what? You’re an internet company.

Guess the journalist: Day Two (US History Lesson)

1.

(Incidentally, this was exactly what happened to the shah of Iran: 1) Sudden surge in oil prices. 2) Delusions of grandeur. 3) Sudden contraction of oil prices. 4) Dramatic downfall. 5) You’re toast.)

Helium Rises: peer review journalism too

I wonder how many regional newspapers can raise $17 million like this?

Helium (www.Helium.com), the online destination to learn what you need and share what you know, today announced the close of over $17M in Series A funding. Investments from an international group of investors, led by Signature Capital LLC and including Northport Private Equity, will help the citizen journalism hub continue to build tight partnerships with leading publishers and provide support for the launch of new digital media products.

“Helium’s unique platforms put the power of citizen engagement behind media publications, enabling them to engage readers in a way that will help grow audiences and increase reader loyalty,” said Bill Turner, Principal, Signature Capital LLC. “With Helium.com, we are bringing our financial resources to further accelerate this growth in citizen journalism, and to support Helium’s objectives towards providing solutions to newspapers at a time when budgets are shrinking and ad revenues are down.”

From BusinessWire.


Helium? Well, it explains itself like this:

It’s easy to find the best articles at Helium because quality rises. Every article is rated by Helium’s writer-members through peer review. After many ratings by many people, quality content rises to the top. Don’t waste time with search results: Read what you need at Helium.

More at Helium, of course.

Shift Control?

As the Guardian goes with a full RSS feed to augment the Berliner, so the Christian Science Monitor announces that it will publish in print only weekly, and daily publishing will be online from April 2009. Techdirt is hopeful:

...in taking that plunge, it will force the CSMonitor to really focus in on making its website as good as it can be, both for readers and for advertisers. That sort of hyperfocus could be quite useful, as we've seen too many newspapers find themselves in a struggle for resources and attention between the (dwindling) cash cow print business, and the small, but growing, online markets. No matter what, you can bet that other big (and small) newspapers will be watching the CSM's leap with great interest as they plan their own strategies for a changing media world.